Reading through Justin Taylor’s always superb roundup of what’s what on the internet this weekend at HTMLGIANT, one thing in particular caught my eye and has been on my mind since. That thing is a review of a book which has recently been released called Capitalism and the Jews by Jerry Z. Muller, who is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America. In the NYT write-up Justin links to, the book is described by the reviewer, Catherine Rampell, who also happens to be the Times online economics editor, as “a provocative and accessible survey of how Jewish culture and historical accident ripened Jews for commercial success and why that success has earned them so much misfortune.” Sounds interesting, right? Certainly, the book comes across as quite attention-grabbing in terms of the data Rampell tells us it has marshalled about the historically ‘unique’ relation between capitalism and the Jews. Confronting the history of what Rampell (with illustrative unselfconsciousness) calls “Jewish capitalistic competence”, Muller’s short collection of essays documents a series of social developments, ideological confrontations and cultural tendencies that led to the Jewish assuming a specific mantle in regards to capital formation in Europe. From what I can glean, this overview of the historical backdrop would be quite useful in itself for one looking to critically negotiate the shifting sands of vexed relation between European religious doctrine and economics in the early modern period, the conflicts and covert alliances that created a zone of highly resented but also highly useful exception around the Jews and allowed for a unusual kind of wealth (and an ideology of wealth-creation) to accumulate alongside it. However, this is less a review of the book, which I have not read, than of the review. For, you see, Rampell’s mobilization of Muller’s book has left me more than a little disconcerted. I’d like to offer a few thoughts as to why.
Having not yet read Muller’s book, I wish to make perfectly clear from the outset that I cannot say with certainty that the ideas articulated in the review are common with Muller or whether they are Rampell’s honeycombing of Muller with her own capitalist realist ideology. However, from what I have gleaned from quotations and snippets I have seen from the book online, I do not think that Rampell has misappropriated the essence of Muller’s book by much. Either way, what is sure is that Rampell’s own take on Muller’s work has a curious double-commentary: not only does it applaud the book for its parsing of the anti-Semitic history that has assigned avariciousness and capitalist exception to the Jewish, it also commends the book as an apologia for capital, with the Jewish as the main resuscitative prop. And, looking at this binding together of Jew and capital in a sort of symbiosis, albeit, for Rampell, an approving one, it struck me: has this not long been the use of the Jewish in a socio-symbolic sense? To stand in as something like the icons of capital? Or the animus, even? In the opening paragraph of his book, cribbed at Amazon, Muller puts forward this preparatory thought: “…Jews have had a special relationship with capitalism, for they have been particularly good at it. Not all of them, of course. But, whenever they have been allowed to compete on an equal legal footing, they have tended to do disproportionately well. This has been a blessing – and a curse.” Here, and again with due caution against drawing any misleadingly definite conclusions before having read the book, I am nonetheless mystified by the unvarnished and non-reflexive way this is presented. It would be as if Jews had some natural genius for capital, some selfish gene, cultural or biological, that made them such sterling practitioners of it. The invocation of the supposedly disproportionate success of Jews wherever there is competition on an equal legal footing leaves me extremely ambivalent, as something uncomfortably close to a certain strand of anti-Semitic ideology. Is this not the very obfuscation that so much of the history of anti-Semitism has thrived upon? That Jews possess some inner elixir for capital others lack? What are we to make of its simple assertion as (qualified) fact (“Not all of them, of course”) in a book which is meant to be devoted to unpacking the prejudicial association of a exceptional bond between the Jewish and capital? Is not the framing of the exceptionality as fact that which should itself come under scrutiny?
Rampell recounts the main thesis of Muller’s book thus. The history of the bulk of anti-Semitism, she writes, is the history of “a misunderstanding of basic economics”. Believing labour to be the only truly productive method of value creation, classical and Christian thought held that the extraction of value from money alone – in the form of interest – was a type of parasitism or theft. Christians were barred by biblical injunction from lending at interest, but the Jewish – allowed to charge interest to gentiles under the legal codes of Deuteronomy (though not to one another) – were not so scripturally bound. Because of this, and because they believed the Jews were damned anyway, the Roman Catholic Church permitted Jewish communities to carry out the ’sinful’ work of lending and, while they were at it, help to stimulate and sustain economic growth. In other words, in Rampell’s recount, the Jews became tied to finance precisely through their convenient status as pariahs that were so naturally sinful they could carry out the dirty work of capital creation.
All of this is only quite fascinating. It is an incisive formulation of the entangled relation between exclusion and exploitation that went in to the “elevation” (if you could call it that) of the Jewish as a specific class of lenders and financiers, marked by money. Nevertheless, what emerges as unusual, to say the least, is Rampell’s barely implicit insistence that the ties between anti-Semitism and the myths of wealthy privilege mean that anti-Semitism has been an indispensable ally to the critique of capitalism itself. Or, in other words, if you scratch an anti-capitalist, you can smell an anti-Semite. In what I found to be a quite startling moment early on in the piece, Rampell berates Marx, in passing, as yet another one of those antediluvians who argued for a system that prized labour value over the extraction of wealth from wealth (actually, Marx’s ire was always directed at accumulation and enclosure, not the extraction itself, but whatever, we needn’t trouble ourselves with actually having read him, communism’s dead, no?). But in dismissing him out of hand, she does not just settle for a derisive remark on his political philosophy. Oh no. She castigates him as – and I quote – “that Jew-baiting former Jew”. I had to read it twice I was so taken aback. I could not quite believe how off-hand and how outrageous such a remark was, let alone in a context like this, devoted, ostensibly, to the anti-ideologisation of such language. And I do not say this merely as a defence of Marx, although he was far from a Jew-baiter, but as a quite astonished sceptic of the supposedly special ties between Jews and capital met with what I can only describe as a virulently prejudicial comment about Jews. Indeed, what are we to make of this notion of Marx as a “Jew-baiting former Jew”? Moreover, why is it we encounter over and over today – in ultra-conservative Islamist clerical, pro-zionist and pro-capitalist political circles – this psychopathology of the counterfeit Jew, the parasitical Jew that isn’t really a Jew – the Jew that is, let us say, a Jew usurious of Jewishness – and that operates, as sneak-Jew, to destroy all orderly structures from within? I would argue that this monstrous “Jew” is an especially useful if covert stereotype for maintaining the popular logic of imperilled security today, whether in territorial or financial terms, that it has, actually, long been a useful figure and force in this regard, and I would propose that the “Jew without values”, the shameless Jew-bating former Jew, the sham Jew, is one of the prime but little mentioned anti-Semitic notions currently at work in the world today.
In a technical sense, Rampell is correct to call Marx a “former” Jew. He was born to a Jewish mother who converted to Lutheranism soon after his birth. At age six, Karl was baptized. Thus, he went from Jew to non-Jew. However, it is not so much the facticity of the statement as the style of its deployment that counts here, as if it somehow demonstrated a peculiar kind of hypocrisy, an especial blindness, a gross miscarriage of racialised self-respect, on Marx’s part that this thinker, once a Jew, would become such a definitive opponent of “Jew-friendly” capitalism. Behind the coarse, loaded assertion that Marx baited Jews, Rampell is almost certainly referring to a text written by Marx in 1843, called “On the Jewish Question” – a response to a book by German philosopher and theologian Bruno Bauer, that had appeared in the same year, opposing the granting of civil and political rights to the Jews as Jews and claiming that their equality under the law would only be appropriate in a Christian state if they converted to Christendom. In this debate, Marx was emphatically on the side of Jewish emancipation but the idiosyncrasy (and, yes, embedded typecasting) of his critique has led to a battery of decontextualized charges that the article holds forth the proof positive of some hidden ‘Jew-baiting’ agenda.
So let us digress in that case to look at the controverisal essay itself. In his response to Bauer, Marx’s first analytical move is to point out that the hypocrisy in the elaborate critique of the Jewish call for civil emancipation as being little more tha a kind of presumption, or egotistical exceptionalism, on their part, offensive to the rest of society – especially in a time where all citizens, Bauer “conscientiously” argues, are politically subjugated by the Christian state, where many are disenfranchised in key ways and have no recourse for certain rights or recognitions. This counterargument, Marx replies, is bogus precisely because it is a means to avoid any interrogation of political emancipation as an ideology in itself. As a parsing out of privileges within the capitalist state, political emancipation is a tier of quasi-freedom which is in categorical ways opposed to the most radical and comprehensive human emancipation. For Marx, accordingly, political emancipation is never universal in the way that human emancipation may only be. But it is this latter emancipation, Marx insists, and this latter emancipation alone, which would provide the only appropriate grounds from which to call for the abolition of Judaism – and religion more generally – as a precondition for political rights from society – as Bauer demands. The distinction between emancipations consequently exposes a distinct obfuscation on Bauer’s part in the exorbitance of the demands he places upon the Jewish, the impossible level of extraordinary obedience they must achieve in order to be equal, through a call for subservience to a political emancipation is conflated for the horizon of human emancipation itself. Thus, as Marx writes:
In this, the Jews are thought to be warranted in their desire for political emancipation precisely because it is a political action, within the state, that moves them. If this call for liberation does not insist to them that they must cast off the general blackmail of political emancipation itself, if it allows them, as Marx writes, to be ‘half-hearted’, this is not a hypocrisy of Jews but ‘inherent in the nature and category of political emancipation’ – part of ‘a general confinement’. In other words, it is not the Jewish duty, any more than any other person’s local duty, to achieve civic rights through overturning the world but, rather, it is the Jewish fate, as with others in the general confinement, to face the frustrations of a political emancipation that will only carry their claims to freedom so far, that will never overturn the world through the simple supply of civic rights. In asserting this, Marx’s purpose is to demolish the idea of an exemplary hypocrisy to Jewish claims for emancipation. He seeks to de-exceptionalise the Jews for he sees that it is the very manipulation of their exceptionalism that is used to deny them their rights. The rhetorical anti-Semitism that tries to dissolve Jewish calls for freedom in claims that these calls are mere contradictions and hypocrisies – that they are already free, essentially (queers, take note) – is said to conflate the integrity of the Jewish claim with the contradictions and hypocrisies native to the very terms of political emancipation itself, inconsistencies through which any political demands will be narrowed and refracted.
Marx’s critique of this prejudicial morality that contends that the Jewish somehow have to make extraordinary efforts to meet the imperfect standards of the social is crucial for what will follow and is worth keeping in mind. It is at this juncture, however, that we turn to the second half of Marx’s essay in which he wades into what surely is, rhetorically speaking, some tricky territory and requires a close reading less of the writer than of the thinker. Turning Bauer on his head, Marx insists that to emancipate the Jews from their religion is not a matter of looking to the stubborn, inveterate resistance to conversion that is said to lie within their faith (their theologico-racial essence) but, rather, to look for the grounds of resistance in the social and secular co-ordinates that underlie the religion. In this turn toward what he dubs ‘the real Jew’, Marx proposes that the secular, as opposed to the theological, basis of Judaism is “practical need, self-interest“, that the worldly religion of the Jew is “huckstering” and that money is his worldly God. It is this set of statements, above all, that is taken as the smoking gun of Marx’s anti-Semitism. And, left at that, this would be inarguably a stock anti-Semitic summation of the avaricious ‘real Jew’ hidden beneath the vestments of a religion. But Marx, wryly, moves forward to add, from this diagnosis of “real” Judaism, a call for “conscience” in universalist terms: “Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.” What Marx unveils in this moment – whatever degree to which one wishes to read this statement as reflective of his own entangled sentiments or canny understanding of those he critiques – is precisely the notion that to ‘abolish’ the supposedly stubborn spectre of ‘pernicious’ Judaism one must abolish the system of capital altogether, not in the guise it ostensibly takes of Jewishness alone. Moreover, the ‘real’ Jew is not the truth of Judaism (a justification for greedy, elite capital) but rather, is shorthand for the fact that it is capital’s greedy elitism that finds its justification in the Jews. In this light, Marx’s subsequent wending together of Judaism and capital in the piece – though fraught with a particularly loaded, particularly problematic associational language Marx does not entirely debunk as sheer anti-Semitic ideology – nonetheless hyper-extremitizes Jewishness not as the truth of capital but as a social ‘question’ that – if we are sincere about it being so ostensibly serious – demands, as its solution, nothing less than the abolition of capital itself.
Figuring the Jewish in terms of the excrescence they were generally held to be in this period, Marx lays the ‘blame’ for them not on their religion, but on the social engineering of the Jew. “Judaism,” he writes, “continues to exist not in spite of history, but owing to history. The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails.” He says at another point: “Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.” In both instances, the distinctly persecutory language is not the point pursued but is an approximation of the landscape of ideas it addresses. It serves as backdrop to the idea, in the first instance cited, that this ostensibly terrible thing – Judaism – is in fact a product of the whole swatch of social relations (and is thus not a question to the Jews but to ourselves). Second of all, it argues that if, indeed, the avariciousness imputed to the Jews actually did undo all the gods of man, this is a thing Marx, as atheist, can only be approving of. In this second statement, Marx does seemingly go on to suggest in a descriptive mode that the God of money ‘unleashed’ by Israel has “robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value”. If it has, however, it has done so not because the Jews orchestrated this deracination of value but because all men are Jews, or, to put it another way, because we have all quite actively and cheerfully adopted ‘their’ one God as our own (remembering, ‘theirs’ is not a God in the strict metaphysical sense; for Marx as atheist, it is, instead, money, and thus the very principle of value’s ability to be exchanged, native to no one: the God of the Jews is, thus, and always has been, the universal Father of all). For this very reason, far from Judaism, it is actually, for Marx, Christianity that is responsible for the universalization of the profit motive. He states: “Judaism reaches its highest point with the perfection of civil society, but it is only in the Christian world that civil society attains perfection. Only under the dominance of Christianity, which makes all national, natural, moral, and theoretical conditions extrinsic to man, could civil society separate itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species-ties of man, put egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-ties, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another.” Note here the careful insistence that ‘Judaism’ reaches its apotheosis in civil society – in the desacralization of the specificity of value adopted as the principle of social organization itself – when Christianity, as the very ideology of this principle, emerges to desacralize the entire world. It is for this reason, at the last, that Marx avers: “Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism – huckstering and its preconditions – the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man’s individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished.” In this, the removal of the Jewish question altogether insists on nothing less than the removal not of the Jews but the whole sweep of the social conditions of capitalism which are falsely codexed by the avatar of the Jews. The empirical basis of ‘Judaism’ is the exchange system of capital that has its ideological principle in Christianity, not the Jews. In essence, then, to eradicate the Jew would mean to eradicate every last living person’s involvement in the system of economic oppression that is thought to be so specially associated with the Judaic name.
It is not lost on me here that the terms in which I have unpacked Marx’s argument ring with an essentializing violence. I do not wish to mitigate this. In fact, I have tried to amplify it. And the reason I have done so is to suggest that the point of this intervention for Marx was always the re-orientation of the Jewish question, within a field of vicious loathing for the Jews, away from the duplicity that elevate the Jews to the status of both an epiphenomenon of a sound Christian capitalist society – the crust – as well as the fundamental instrumental cause of its systemic social inequities – the core. Let us turn back now to Rampell and her phrase: “Jew-baiting former Jew.” More than anything today, I hate how the entangled history of conspiracy theories against the Jewish as arch capitalist controllers have been held to derive from outside of capitalism when, in fact, time and time again, they have come from squarely within the capitalist system. Anti-Semitism, far from the special shame of anti-capitalism (although anti-capitalism cannot claim full freedom of it, not by any measure), is a mechanism by which capital absolves itself of its own constitutionally systemic excesses and exteriorizes its anti-capitalist opponents as pathological fanatics. In her review, Rampell notes that Christian moneylenders in early modern Europe were, on occasion, legally designated temporary Jews when they lent money to French or English kings. This is, for her, a sign of the alliance of anti-Semitism with the phobia toward capital in a need to offset the taint of usury by blaming the Jew. But note that this only happened ’sometimes’, ‘on occasion’. Was it perhaps then that this was less an impulsive phobia or more like a strategic ritual in which the wider practice of Christian moneylending could, at moments, be tied back to its ‘origin’ in the Jew? Indeed, was not the whole concept of permitting Jews to finance a means to zone out the consequences of capital on to a ‘temporal’ agency that church and state exploited to structure economies? Would it not be more appropriate to see such temporary Jewishness as a kind of strategy of permission for capitalism itself – for allowing a pre-modern capitalism to develop and take place in a ‘material’ zone – named Jew – that could then move beyond that group while offsetting the theological consequences by finding the violence of its origin there? And, in what is perhaps the most significant point, was this not to deploy the Jews as labourers of capital? Not only scapegoats for Europe’s own atavistic suspicion of making money off of money (not atavistic enough, it seems) but the guarantors that it could make money off of money freely in the ideological circumstances, reaping the material benefits of economic expansion while alleviating the penalties accrued in a spiritual sense by the ‘worldly’ sacrifice? Has capital not always thrived precisely through this expropriation of the labour-value of others? So we must ask: was capitalism ever really to be found in the Jewish lenders, per se, or in the very consent they were granted to lend? As Rampell notes, the Jewish, as Europe’s official moneylenders, became “both necessary and despised.” She writes:
The Jews, then, were necessary but it would be wrong to think they were the motor of capital, as much as the pistons forced (sometimes phantasmagorically, sometimes actually) to power the process. Curious on precisely this count is the evocation by Rampell of ‘business sense’, a seemingly anachronistic word in the context and yet – not. For one might say that it made good ‘business sense’, as it were, to localize the structural exorbitance of lending in economic conditions in which capital was ’scarce’ on a minority that could be used to advance investment and, yet, which could also be eschewed ideologically whenever was required and at a profit to the state – such as the arbitrary cancellations of debt and the seizure of assets. In this, the overall system of profit stole from the Jews with both hands: the growth of financial trading and the money system was guaranteed by the Jewish exemption while the innate tendency of capital toward extortion was transfigured into a characteristic of the lenders and could be redressed by symbolic (and financially recompensing) expropriations. By zeroing in, then, upon the Jews as the very spirit of capitalist enterprise and pillage, the state made the Jews the exploited workers of capital’s own development. As such, to understand Jewish relations to capital in this period must be to understand the early capitalist labour of lending.
To insist that anti-capitalism has always been a twin of anti-Semitism is to replicate the anti-Semitic assumption that the Jews possess a natural history of capitalist genius, as though it were just born or weened into them. What’s worse, this apparently special relationship is taken – as Marx’s supposedly “anti-Semitic” critique first observed way back in 1843 – as something non-social, as a matter of exceptionality that has nothing to do with the wider relations of exchange in which it takes place. To try and insist that anti-capitalism is anti-Semitic is to engage in the age-old anti-Semitic practice of making the Jews capital’s guarantors. This is, indeed, the subtext that Marx struggles to articulate in his critique of Bauer – and much to his credit for 1843, succeeds, if problematically. Marx argues that Judaism is mystified as capital’s dirty secret. And we know this is mystification because if the Jews are such an issue, abolishing capital will quick smart abolish the issue the Jews ‘present’. The purpose of the Jew, then, is to act as symbolic guarantor of capital’s continuation by becoming the locus of all its inequities and problems. And it is this which brings us to yet another incarnation of the Jew within capital: namely, the Jew as Communist. In his book, Muller argues that the rise of extreme right-wing anti-Semitism had much to do with the prominent (although statistical unexceptional) involvement of Jews in early twentieth century anti-capitalist movements. Thus, he writes (in a quote I have cribbed from another review by a former editor of the New York Post): “In Germany, where political anti-Semitism had been on the wane before 1914, the role of the Jews in the postwar revolutions was the key element in the revival of anti-Semitism on the right.” And again: “…the conspicuous role played by Jews in the Communist movement, though rarely the primary cause of the anti-Jewish sentiment, fanned the flames of anti-Semitism.” So, it would seem that the anti-capitalist recruitment of Jews brought about a kind of Götterdämmerung for them as they became the prime targets of the ire against anti-capital. Outside of this argument entirely sidelining the autonomy of anti-Semitism as a notion for the German far right – and, most especially, for Hitler – it is quite astounding in its proximity to arguments advanced during the Historikerstreit (Historian’s quarrel) in West Germany during the 1980s that Auschwitz was merely a reaction to “the annihilating occurrences of the Russian Revolution”. And yet, what is most curious here is the projection that anti-capitalist Jews were, in some way, a real evil, rather than a fantasy entirely concocted as an anti-communist myth within capital. If capital thrived off having a figure to pin its excesses upon, it also found a way to phobically transfigure resistance to it as well. In her review, Rampell remarks that the Jews “improbably became associated with both abhorred poles of political economy: hypercapitalism and Communism” (my emphasis). I would like to venture, however, that there is little that is improbable about the Jews becoming representatives of the two “abhorred poles” of hypercapitalism and communism at all. The very reason Judeo-Bolshevism arose as a concept within capital was precisely as a logical extension of the already well-established use of anti-Semitism as a way to triangulate the excesses of capital in terms of a theoretically expellable entity. That is to say, if capital exploited the Jewish as labourers in its own development by presenting them as the very face of cutthroat capitalist enclosure, it also, unsurprisingly, cast them as the two-face of anti-capital too, as the fundamental antagonists to the success of an enlightened and rational capital, that mean which is only to be undermined by a group whose avariciousness has proven that they care nothing for value. I return you here to that tone in Rampell’s remark on Marx: that sneer, “Jew-baiting former Jew.” This is the Jew without values, the Jew who is so treacherous, so devoid of anything other than self-interest, they will turn against capital itself. The Jew without values is what allows the Jewish to emerge as über-capitalists and as rabid Communists. In both directions, bridging the contradiction, the Jewish are so self-interested they have abandoned their loyalty to that which ‘made’ them, in either their criminal excesses or their efforts to overturn the system. And in either direction, the Jews are always capital’s category of wreckers, from within or without, a category that absolves the system itself from being thought in itself as an interminable process of expropriational wrecking.
No matter whether it were summoned up as a critique of hypercapitalism or as a critique of Communism, this kind of anti-Semitism – in which the Jew is invariably to blame for placing capital at risk – always starts out from within capital. Nazism takes it beyond capital into a sublime aesthetics of anti-Semitism for its own sake but the blame begins here, in capitalist climes. To assign capitalism to the work of the Jews was never a Leftist narrative of capital. Indeed, if Leninist Russia had a complex, often anti-Semitic relation to the Jews, and it certainly did – figuring Jews as recidivist capitalists, criminals prone to usury, and so on, as particularly steeped in false consciousness and recalcitrant anti-revolutionaries, it had no time for the conspiratorial arguments that framed capital as an especially Jewish creation, precisely because this was a bracketing movement that went against universalization. If anything, the most anti-Semitic idea of Bolshevik anti-capitalism was not that Jews were the string-pullers of capital but that they were especially privileged tools of it. (A view which would take on truly terrible, if uneven, consequences in the persecution of Jews in Stalinist Russia). Thus, as capitalists or anti-capitalists, the Jewish have always been taken by capital as a foil for – and a locus of – the extremities of exploitation and opposition that capital creates. Indeed, their deployment in a social-symbolic sense helped create the very idea of ‘extremities’, that “hypercapitalism” is something distinct from “civilized capital” and Communism’s extremist political economic analogue. The conjuration of the Jews, accordingly, continues to give credence time and again to a notion that capital excess has a correctable agential reasoning and not an ineluctable systemic cause. Their resurfacing in the form of anti-capitalism is taken by capitalists themselves as a sign of faulty value in anti-capitalism – for its Jewish face tells us the truth of things, how treacherous this movement is, how perverse, how ineluctably mistaken. And, at the last, their secret function as the two-face of capital’s truest believers and its truest enemies is to promote the enduring notion that a moderate capital will spontaneously function without exploitation only so long as that greedy, opportunistic “interest” is kept under control and at bay.
How does all of this relate to anti-Semitism in the world today? Did this threatening figure of Jewish valuelessness and extremity pass away with the convulsions of the Holocaust? If it is still around, in what way does it continue to exist? For all the prurient jouissance of organizations like the Anti-Defamation League that thrive upon grooming through polls ‘confirmation’ of endemic anti-Semitism in the contemporary West, it is clear enough that anti-Semitism is not the hard currency that it was in the last century. And, given that it involved the greatest single crime in history thus far to make that happen, we have nothing to be proud about. If folk bigotry continues to insist upon the Jews as drinkers of blood, as parasites of finance, as ringmasters of the media, as the reason for defeat in war and poverty in peace, and they do, none of these are given time as transparent claims to truth on the level of social symbolism. They exist, self-consciously, defensively, as conspiracy. Similarly, we also know that anti-Semitism has an ongoing life in the Middle East. We are only too aware (it is, indeed, an indispensable part of the popular profile of Arab benightedness) of the currents of blame and hate against Jews that eddy and are stoked by certain sclerotic regimes of the “Arab world”, looking to offset the costs of their own repression and corruption. Therefore, acknowledging that this awareness already exists, I do not wish to rehearse here the endless hysterical attacks upon Arabs as anti-Semites, as though this were not, in itself, a ferociously racialised claim about the atavism of Arab hates. If Ahmadinejad publicly claims that the Holocaust was a fabrication, if The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are still taught as the secret handbook of Zionist world conquest, if solidarity for the Palestinians is, indeed, often expressed in a blanket and comprehensive vituperation toward Jews in the service of regional power plays, our staunch antipathy to such flat-earthing of the political must be coupled with a certain understanding that these practices are also mobilized symbolically by the West as matters that stoke our moral indignation but do little or nothing to think through this anti-Semitism as a symptom of the collapse in the Middle East of a viable, sustainable Left to combat it. Thus, putting all this to one side, I wish to turn us away from this more cogent anti-Semitism – one which, in its very symbolic power, is already obvious to us, and to them – and point instead to a more recent, little noted and more vexing global manipulation of Jewishness.
In 2009, during the course of the election campaign that fraudulently returned Ahmadinejad to power in Iran, accusations emerged from the reformist side that the president had a Jewish ancestry which he had tried to conceal. What was curious about this ripple – reported in the wake of the protests, but made relevant internally before the election – was precisely its mobilization of the idea of the ‘Jew-baiting former Jew’ as a kind of morality tale of extremity and concealment. As The Australian reported at the time, “Those inclined to believe the story say it would explain the vehemence with which Mr. Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust and why he repeatedly calls for Israel’s disappearance — a desire to distance himself from any suggestion of a Jewish origin.” In other words, if we can take this report for the ‘commonsense’ on the ground, the purpose of the rumour was to work in two directions: to expose Ahmadinejad’s extremism as extremist – to undermine his representativeness – in the electoral lead-up while also maintaining the fundamental integrity necessary to the clerical regime (whether in its conservative or reformist aspects) of the fundamental fantasy of Jewish pathology – to thus, in that sense, maintain the regime’s representativeness. I do not wish to conflate this quite specific instant with the protests that erupted upon Ahmadinejad’s return, to foolishly tar them as anti-Semitic or as led by anti-Semites, or anything of the like. This would be to ignore the revolutionary radicalization that has taken place in Iran when the pretense of electoral representativeness was shattered by Ahmadinejad’s re-appointment. Nor do I wish to suggest for a moment that the voters’ turn against Ahmadinejad was due in any way to this appeal toward his “Jewish” heritage, as though this type of dog-whistle politics transparently worked. Rather, I would argue that the ‘Jewish’ Ahmadinejad came about to justify the shift among the elite of the regime itself and that it came about, almost as a structural necessity, after the president’s extremism was already well-established as, shall we say, a little too kosher. It arose, in other words, as a pathologization technique that could cover the distance for reformist clerics between a break with Ahmadinejad’s ‘pure’ commitment to the regime’s anti-Western, anti-democratic values while retaining continuity with the conservative clerical power structure of the regime itself.
Before we get too smug, we should understand that this is an ideological operation that is dangerously replicated in its own way amongst our own moral conservatives, in the most nefarious Jewish stereotype pedaled currently in the West: namely, the figure of the ’self-hating Jew’, the Jew that assaults Jewishness under the guise of his or her own heritage. This, as Antony Lerman at The Guardian has noted, is a trope of Jewish anti-Semitism pronounced most often by Jews against other Jews. And it specifically appears as an attack by pro-Israeli conservatives and liberals against Jewish critics of the Palestinian occupation. So it is when Richard Goldstein of the United Nations commission into atrocities committed during the Gaza conflict returned with the finding that both sides had carried out war crimes, Israeli finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, slammed him as an anti-Semitic Jew who hated Jews and looked only to “discriminate against our people”. In this accusation, a certain archetype of capitalist anti-Semitism is resurrected: the Jew as usurer, the Jew without values, the wrecking Jew. Or, take the case of Norman Finkelstein, whose admittedly polemically toned and often too rigid, sweeping scholarship, has been accused – in a despicable act of transference – of being nothing other than the “twenty-first century updating of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion” – and this from a highly respected historian taking a supposedly ‘objective’ overview of the disputes around Finkelstein, no less. In this, I do not wish to argue that such pronouncements of Jewish anti-Semitism are themselves plainly anti-Semitic for this would only repeat the faulty terms of the argument. On the contrary, I would suggest that this pathologisation of Jews by Jews is a fetishist structure of cynicism, the same type of cynical fetish as we witnessed in the assault on Ahmadinejad’s origins above. Its anti-Semitic dimension lies precisely in its instrumentalisation of something as serious as anti-Semitism as a manipulable card to play, a prime tactic and tool in the kit of its political agenda, and, moreover, as a key means to inflate an artificial sense of precarity in Israel, a sense of a perpetual presence within the national and diasporic body that could or, more importantly, would actually ‘undo’ Israel’s right to exist (rather than ‘redo’ it, justly). As the fantasy of the Palestinians as an imminent existential threat to the nation-state has becoming harder and harder to domestically and internationally sustain (and it is not often noted that the open secret of Israel’s nuclear arsenal was meant to solve this problem of erasure years before, and, at the risk of total devastation for invaders, effectively has), it is less the Palestinians that form a direct political threat to the state (their threat is still only deemed terroristic by Israel) but, rather, the agitation of the Jews themselves. It is thus that we have the return of our old, self-interested, opportunistic friend: the Jew without values.
The spectre of the Jews that would undo Israel serve the same function as the anti-capitalist Jews of old: in which the unjust non-sustainability of the system was cast off into a treacherous group of Jews who ‘misconstrue’ the real nature of things, who turn their backs on their capitalist home. On the other side of this division, we have capitalist anti-Semitism reheated in the form of Ahmadinejad slandered as secretively Jewish so as to account for both his extremity and its deviant root and to absolve the broader dynamics of the breakdown in the Iranian regime itself. To this, we might add a third point, turning back to the placid western democracies. As I noted above, anti-Semitism no longer holds sway as an open discourse of social symbolism in first world capitalist countries. But it did, however, return as a kind of liberal ghost of itself in the opening moments of the international financial crisis. Though he has by now largely faded from our consciousness, his purpose, we might say, served, did not Bernie Madoff, and his notorious Ponzi scheme, act as both the prism through which the crisis’s initial outbreak was conceptualized as well as the paradigm through which it was limited in terms of a scheme, the largest in history, perhaps, but nonetheless, a plot, a manipulation, a moral play? It rarely gets mentioned but concerns were raised in regards to Madoff at least four separate times from 1999 through to 2008, all of which were actively investigated and cleared of fraud by the U.S. Security and Exchanges Commission. This investigative blindness – its inability to detect any difference when the business crossed over from legitimate activity into criminal plot – is surely the most illustrative element of the Madoff case but was lost, at the time, in the comedy and drama of his imprisonment in his penthouse, under 24 hour monitoring, in a form of hyper-surveillance through which we could observe, in a forensic mode, the pathogen itself. In his most recent book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek discusses the Madoff case so:
Here one has to ask a naïve question: did Madoff not know that, in the long term, his scheme was bound to collapse? What force denied him this obvious insight? Not Madoff’s own personal vice or irrationality, but rather a pressure, an inner drive to go on, to expand the sphere of circulation in order to keep the machinery running, inscribed into the very system of capitalist relations. In other words, the temptation to ‘morph’ legitimate business into a pyramid scheme is part of the very nature of the capitalist circulation process. There is no exact point at which the Rubicon was crossed and the legitimate business morphed into an illegal scheme; the very dynamic of capitalism blurs the frontier between ‘legitimate’ and ‘wild’ speculation, because capitalist investment is, at its very core, a risky wager that a scheme will turn out to be profitable, an act of borrowing from the future. A sudden uncontrollable shift in circumstances can ruin a supposedly ’safe’ investment – this is what capitalist ‘risk’ turns on. And, in ‘postmodern’ capitalism, potentially ruinous speculation is raised to a much higher level than was even imaginable in earlier periods.
As a concluding aside, Žižek commends the US public for its maturity in that “there have been no signs of anti-Semitism in their reaction to the financial crisis.” I think he misses the point. One might say that it was exactly the absence of anti-Semitism that was, ironically, the most anti-Semitic element about the whole thing. The appropriation of anti-Semitism in the Madoff case was inscribed in the very transparency of his extraordinary criminality. It was within the very attempts to mark him out as the core of the financial crisis via his criminality, in his availability for such an alignment. Žižek is not wrong to see in Madoff “an extreme but therefore pure example of what caused the financial breakdown” but he is mistaken to think that we were not meant to see it. Rather, what we were not meant to see were the ties between crime and capital in terms of the morphological structure of Žižek’s deeper explication. Madoff was designed to be the truth of the crisis as capitalist crime so as to prevent it from being seen as the crime of capital. And this worked because he was so clearly a criminal. In such a moral drama of excess and agency, it was hardly coincidental he would be a Jew, as the very lack of reference to this fact only enhanced the supposed transparency – and thus truth – of the morality tale his corrupt person conveyed. If it is not permissible for us to point out such ‘connections’ directly any longer – that is to say, even if we never consciously associated Madoff’s criminality with his Jewishness (and yet, somehow, even with a name like Madoff, we still all know he was a Jew) – if it is a ‘touchy’ issue, nonetheless it is still common sense – as Rampell writes – and so something of a real mystery, rather than a bogus conspiratorial claim, that “so many Jews have been so good at making money”.
Anti-Semitism does, indeed, exist today as a serious dilemma, but not in the way the Anti-Defamation League says. In the end, the role of anti-Semitism currently is not located in any one specific location but is to be found in the very “usury” of the concept by the international political economy itself: by political capital in all its diverse, perverse but repressively integrated globosity. In our shared climate of worldwide contemporary cynicism, what the bad man Madoff, the self-hating anti-Israelites, and the Jewish Ahmadinejad all share in common is the interest returned on lending out the prejudice to fit – between them – any particular ideological mode or moment: neoliberal capitalist, zionist or anti-Western conservative clerical. Post-Holocaust, anti-Semitism has graduated to a more speculative plane of slander in which it is nothing like the twisted, rapacious, sickening sincerity that drove the Nazis on but, rather, is now a sort of digital racism, one that is used to encode an accusation of lawlessness racially but which is not owned aloud in analogue, as outrightly racial by any of its usurers. For if it were, it would be too obviously ideological, too unreconstructed for our channel-flicking, tolerant tastes. The picture, we might say, would not nearly be clear enough. The fuzz would interfere with the vision. So it is, on this count, that even Ahmadinejad’s loud, passionate ranting attacks on the Jews smack less of the Nazis to which he is endlessly compared and more – as Žižek has pointed out – of Berlusconi on immigrants. While it would be flatly wrong to think this meant that he was not genuine in his chauvinism, that he, like Berlusconi on immigrants, could not do, would not do and has not done real racist damage, Ahmadinejad, like Berlusconi, comes over not composed in his outrageousness (like Hitler) but as an excess in himself, demonstrably thuggish and patently clownish. While it has its populist reach, his anti-Semitism falls short in the wider domestic, regional and world imaginary of the socio-political and cultural elite due to its very straightforwardness, its startling lack of finesse. Its antics are offensive to those in the regime’s clerical opposition that know a more sophisticated way to make the same point. And like Berlusconi’s anti-immigrant hysterics to the rest of Europe, it is not a matter of policy disagreement between the parties so much as it is a deep disapproval of a spectacularly tactless mode of approach. So it is that Ahmadinejad becomes “Jew”. So it is also that anti-occupation Jews become “Jew”, not only to zionists but to two-state solution liberals. And that Madoff is “Jew” without anyone needing to say so. Less than the prejudice embodied in Ahmadinejad’s image, the more disconcerting anti-Semitism of late – because entirely unexplicated – can be found in the renewed fabrication of the Jew without values, the counterfeit Jew. This Jew has never seemed to have done with us, has never quite gone away. It is exactly in this sense that Marx’s radical claim that the real abolition of the “Jew” demands the abolition of the system therefore presses upon us today more than ever – if not quite in the sense he said it. If we are to rid ourselves in the future of these apparitional Jews, these Jews without values, these Jew-baiting former Jews, that trouble our societies with their excesses and extremes, there is no other option but to dismantle the global politics that requires their existence. Let us face down the new anti-Semitism by taking note of Marx’s “anti-Semitic” dictum. Let us abolish the “Jew” in ourselves.
